The sadness that envelopes the story of the suspension of Ricky Williams, that mix of disbelief and sympathy over the news that a man with so much to lose would allow himself in fact to lose it all, must be accompanied by a bit of satisfaction that there still is some sense of order in the world of professional sports.

A player makes a mistake. He gets caught. He pays a price. What happened to Williams could happen to any one of us in our jobs, which in and of itself is a surprise. It's not often that multimillionaire professional athletes are lumped in with the rest of us.

Williams, the talented and mysterious Miami Dolphins running back, was suspended for the 2006 season by the National Football League after his appeal of a fourth positive drug test for an undisclosed banned substance was denied. Williams had previously tested positive for marijuana, although it's not known what this positive test turned up.

"I'm disappointed with the decision, but I respect it," Williams said in a statement. "I'm proud of my association with the National Football League and look forward to returning to the Dolphins in 2007."

Nonetheless, he's gone for a year, exchanging one job description (running back) for another (being made an example). In his new role, he reminds us of the relative might and believability inherent in an established drug-testing plan such as the NFL's, even if the conversation this time isn't believed to be about steroids, and even if we will always wonder how it is that 325-pound linemen populate the earth.

Whenever a player is caught and punished — really punished — it's a reminder of what wasn't happening for years in the major leagues. While the Olympic world began testing for performance-enhancing drugs in 1972, the NFL got into the game only in 1989. As late to the party as football was, consider that Major League Baseball finally pulled its head out of the sand and kicked off its steroid testing and penalty program in 2004.

There must be some days that Ricky Williams wishes he were a baseball player. Then again, in the arena of policing recreational drugs, MLB was a player far earlier, albeit an ineffectual one.

Back in 1983, Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Steve Howe tested positive for cocaine three times in one month, leading Commissioner Bowie Kuhn to suspend him for the 1984 season to protect the "image of baseball." But this being baseball, not football, Howe had his suspension shortened by an arbitrator and lifted that May.

On Howe's seventh drug-related banishment from the game, in 1992, he was kicked out for life, but an arbitrator overturned that ruling, saying it was too severe. Howe finally left the game four years later.

The fact that baseball tried, and failed, to rid its sport of a recreational drug user back then makes its decades-long lack of interest in trying to catch its steroid cheaters all the more remarkable.

No one — not the NCAA, not the Olympics, not the NFL, certainly not MLB — is catching everyone who is taking drugs. The bad chemists are still far ahead of the good chemists. Every time a baseball official puffs his chest and tells us that the sport is well on its way to solving its steroid problem, we should remind him that baseball is three decades behind the Olympics — and that in the Olympics, 34 years after testing was initiated, athletes undoubtedly are still taking performance-enhancing drugs and getting away with it.

Let's all make a vow to check in with MLB in 2040 and see how the steroid sleuthing is coming along.

By not doing what the NFL did, by not even making an attempt until this century to deal with its steroid problems, baseball left open the door for others to do so. Of late, there have been a lot of people rushing through that door.

The most recent is the federal grand jury investigating whether disgraced slugger Barry Bonds committed perjury when he denied knowingly taking performance-enhancing drugs. The San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News reported the grand jury has subpoenaed Bonds' personal trainer, Greg Anderson, who is alleged to have provided Bonds with his drugs.

What Anderson will say, and what his testimony will mean to Bonds' already diminished credibility, is of course unknown.

But a fascinating tale of deception just might get more interesting, and illuminating, proving that a league that doesn't take care of its problems will eventually have them taken care of for them.